La petite mort
by AuroraRomCom
Summary: If only talking to oneself did not look mad, no day would go by without my being heard growling to myself, against myself, "you silly shit."
1. Chapter 1

When I was a girl, I had a fear of spiders.

This is known, a matter of public record. It is part of Widowmaker's villainous monologues, the old and artless trope of mastering the thing you fear and thereby gaining its ability to inspire dread. Soon-to-be tortured hostages, old Overwatch foes, new Talon recruits: for being such a recluse, she's told them all about spiders and heartbeats and death.

What I don't tell people, the fact that isn't part of the Widowmaker persona, is that this fear persisted into adulthood.

Gérard, bless his soul, never made light of my fears. " _Mon amour_ ," he would say, trapping some hideous bug between a tumbler and his newspaper, "fear is a healthy thing." And when he came back from tossing the spider on the lawn, he would wrap his arms around me and whisper in my ear, "Amélie, you are so brave and so smart. If you were not afraid of spiders, what use would I be to you?"

We shared many things, but none as personal as our fears. I'm not even certain that he told Dr. Zielger he suffered from _cauchemars_ —night terrors and sleep paralysis, terrible waking moments where his mind was conscious but his body frozen.

We visited the restored Louvre, once. I remember how animated he became when he saw Fuseli's _The Nightmare_. Apparently, cultures all across the globe share stories of malefic beings that steal through the night and perch on your chest, crushing the life out of you while your immobilized body cannot respond. He was so happy to share, to take this moment of personal misery and make it into something that brought us closer together.

I loved Gérard for many reasons, but his ability to find greatness in the terrible was his most endearing trait.

I don't know how Talon knew. Like I said, our fears were personal, _ours_. But it was not enough that Gérard die. No, he had made Talon suffer. His death needed to be artful, personalized, tailored to his specific fears. And so I watched out of foreign eyes as _she_ drugged him with a paralytic agent, moved with alien limbs as she climbed on to his chest, felt as a stranger's hands wrapped around his throat and strangled the light out of his eyes.

But of course, it wasn't a stranger. No night hag snuck into our bedroom and took my love.

It was my hands that killed my husband. And not a day goes by that I don't fantasize about wrapping those same hands around _her_ throat.


	2. Chapter 2

_She_ won't let me. Believe me, I have tried. I've been trying from the very first moment Gérard rescued me, trying to articulate that something was wrong, to force out the words that _you are not safe_.

And how much more I tried to stop myself, two weeks later! I fought with every fiber of my being, with every ounce of my soul, and I _lost_.

I sometimes imagine I can hear Gérard, gently chastising me. " _Mon amour_ , anything is possible. You must simply try harder." But that is me, being cruel to myself—or perhaps it is Widowmaker in my mind, taunting the weak Amélie for her failures. "If only you had wanted it more, your husband might still be alive."

But I have gotten better. More clever. I can't overpower this personality that Talon has hammered into my skull. She's just as clever as I am, and suspicious to boot. I can't throw us off a cliff or force us to drink lye. There are just too many steps in the process, too many commands that need to be perfectly executed. Most of the time, it takes all of my willpower to make one of Widowmaker's fingers twitch.

I can influence small things, though. The Widowmaker personality isn't a complete "package." Maybe that's why Talon kept me around, after Gérard was killed. My poise, my eye for detail—hell, even my looks—these are things that Widowmaker has to rely on to be successful. And it's through this back door that I introduce uncertainty, imprecision. A grenade held a moment too long after it is triggered. An edge of doubt about how the wind will affect a killing shot. My personal favorite was when I saved the life of a young boy by focusing on the color of his arm cast. "Just what shade green would you call that, Widowmaker?"

"Vert," she snapped back, leveling the rifle. But it was too late! He was away, and no more innocent blood was shed that day.

We're trapped in a perpetual struggle of wills: I can't win, but her doctors can't obliterate me without running the chance of creating _une_ _aubergine_.

And so it goes. Widowmaker keeps track of the kills that made her feel alive. I keep track of her would-be kills that are still alive.


End file.
